It can't happen here II

Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in re-civilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called 'intellectual' teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of 'intellectualism'.

Sinclair Lewis, It can't happen here (1935).

It can't happen here

Escrito en 1935, cuando fascismo no era una mala palabra sino una posible solución, si bien administrada, a las crisis económicas y morales. Si bien administrada, claro, porque era evidente que era una solución que podía descontrolarse. Pero no, eso nunca podría ocurrir. No aquí.

"The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek".

"On a day in late October, the Corpos... arrested every known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. They were tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately... There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but this was adequately answered by Windrip's courageous statement: 'The way to stop crime is to stop it!'"

"Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason so justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations of Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey."

"As with all his colleagues, his professorship was taken over by a most worthy and needy white man, whose training in anthropology had been as photographer on one expedition to Yucatan."

"In his two years of dictatorship, Berzelius Windrip daily became more a miser of power. He continued to tell himself that his main ambition was to make all citizens healthy, in purse and mind, and that if he was brutal it was only toward fools and reactionaries who wanted the old clumsy systems."

Sinclair Lewis, It can't happen here (1935).

Machines like me

No me dejó citas este libro. La idea básica es inteligente, pero toda la trama es débil. Se arrastra para conseguir llegar al esperable final, en un universo paralelo en el cual Alain Turing está vivo y tiene poca imaginación. El robot Adam no tiene pecado original, lo que lo hace inadecuado para vivir entre humanos. Y acaba asesinado, como ya ocurrió antes en casos similares. El juego de palabras del título no gana más significado después de leer el libro. Un libro comercial.

American Psycho

"I check my Rolex while I'm buying scruffing lotion at the Clinique counter, still in Bergdorf's, to make sure I have enough time to shop some more before I have to meet Tim Severt for drinks at the Princeton Club at seven. I worked out this morning for two hours before the office and though I could have used this time for a massage (since my muscles are sore from the exhausting exercise regime I'm now on) or a facial, even though I had one yesterday, there are just too many cocktail parties in the upcoming weeks that I have to attend and my presence at them will put a crimp in my shopping schedule so it's best if I get the shopping out of the way now. I run into Bradley Simpson from P & P outside F.A.O, Schwarz and he's wearing a glen-plaid worsed wool suit with notched lapels by Perry Ellis, a cotton broadcloth shirt by Gitman Brothers, a silk tie by Savoy, a chronograph with a crocodileskin band by Breil, a cotton raincoat by Paul Smith and a fur felt hat by Paul Stuart."
...
"After she falls to the floor beside the body, a few people turning around, I find myself shouting out, my voice heavy with emotion, "I'm a doctor, move back, I'm a doctor", and I kneel beside the mother before an interested crowd gathers around us and I pry her arms off the child, who is now on his back struggling vainly for breath, the blood coming evenly but in dying arcs out of his neck and onto his Polo shirt, which is drenched with it. And I have a vague awareness during the minutes I hold the child's head, reverently, careful not to bloody myself, that if someone makes a phone call or if a real doctor is at hand, there's a good chance the child can be saved."

Bret E. Ellis, American Psycho (1991).

Babbitt

"Take all these fellows we know, the kind right here in the club now, that seem to be perfectly content with their home-life and their business, and that boost Zenith and the Chamber of Commerce and holler for a million population. I bet if you could cut into their heads you'd find that one-third of 'em are sure-enough satisfied with their wives and kids and friends and their offices; and one-third feel kind of restless but won't admit it; and one-third are miserable and know it. They hate the whole peppy, boosting, go-ahead game, and they're bored by their wives and think their families are fools - at least when they come to forty or forty-five they're bored - and they hate business, and they'd go - Why do you suppose there's so many 'mysterious' suicides? Why do you suppose so many Substantial Citizens jumped right into the war? Think it was all patriotism?"
...
The advertisements were truly philantropic. One of them bore the rousing headline: "Money! Money!! Money!!!" The second announced that "Mr. P. R., formerly making only eighteen a week in a barber shop, writes to us that since taking our course he is now pulling down $5,000 as an Osteo-vitalic Physician;" and the third that "Miss J. L., recently a wrapper in a store, is now getting Ten Real Dollars a day teaching our Hindu System of Vibratory Breathing and Mental Control."
...
She made him what is known as a Good Wife. She was loyal, industrious, and at rare times merry. She passed from a feeble disgust at their closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it drooped into bored routine. Yet she existed only for him and for the children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up the law and trudged on in a rut of listing real estate.
...
"That's a fact. They're getting so they don't have a single bit of respect for you. The old-fashioned coon was a fine old cuss - he knew his place - but these young dinges don't want to be porters or cotton-pickers. Oh, no! They got to be lawyers and professors and Lord knows what all! I tell you, it's becoming a pretty serious problem. We ought to get together and show the black man, yes, and the yellow man, his place. Now, I haven't got one particle of race-prejudice. I'm the first to be glad when a nigger succeeds - so long as he stays where he belongs and doesn't try to usurp the rightful authority and business ability of the white man."
"That's the i.! And another thing we got to do," said the man with the velour hat (whose name was Koplinsky), "is to keep these damn foreigners out of the country. Thank the Lord, we're putting a limit on immigration. These Dagoes and Hunkies have got to learn that this is a white man's country, and they ain't wanted here."
...
He was thinking. It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practised it was futile; that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn't much pleasure out of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they might rear children whou would rear children. What was it all about? What did he want?
...
"There's a lot of these fellows that think if workmen go on strike they're a regular bunch of fiends. Now, of course, it's a fight between sound business and the destructive element, and we got to lick the stuffin's out of 'em when they challenge us, but doggoned if I see why we can't fight like gentlemen and not go calling 'em dirty dogs and saying they ought to be shot down."
...
He was conscious that his line of progress seemed confused. He wondered what he would do with his future. He was still young; was he through wiwth all adventuring? He felt that he had been trapped into the very net from which he had with such fury escaped and, supremest jest of all, been made to rejoice in the trapping.
"They've licked me; licked me to a finish!" he whimpered.

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (1924). As put forward by Philip Roth in "The Human Stain", since the 90s western society has been behaving as if nobody had read Babbitt, and since the 2000s as if it had never been written.